Uzo Aduba: My Road to ‘Orange Is the New Black’

August 5, 2014 2:30 PM

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I am the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. My mother is a survivor of both polio and of the Igbo genocide during her country’s civil war in the late 1960s. Each Igbo name has a story behind it, so upon my birth, my mother carefully chose my name to be Uzoamaka, which means “the road is good.”

My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Women’s Singles tennis champion in college. This summarizes my mother comp...